PIC Headlines - 2003

Information by State  Print version

December 24, 2003: PICTEST will be offline for testing during the period from 4 p.m. Eastern on December 24th to Noon Eastern on December 29th. Users will not be able to log on to PICTEST. However, the PIC Production system will be available throughout the holidays to accept data.

November 20, 2003: Reminder - For all Section 8 PHAs with FYE of 9/30/2003 and with 250 or more vouchers under contract as well as smaller Section 8 PHAs that are designated "Troubled", your SEMAP certification must be submitted in PIC no later than Saturday, November 29, 2003 (8 days to go). PHAs with less than 250 vouchers under contract who are not designated "Troubled" need not submit a certification this time but may do so if they so choose. If you submit a certification, it will be scored. If you are not sure whether you are required to submit, call your local HUD Field Office. If you are having technical problems with PIC SEMAP, call PICHelp at 1-800-366-6827.

October 30, 2003: During the past few hours there have been reports of users receiving "9500" errors which say they must relogon to PIC. However, when they relogon, they get the same error message. Technical staff checked and Web Server #2 was causing the problem. PIC has five web servers and the other four were working normally. The problem has now been corrected and Web Server #2 is running normally again. Sorry for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

October 27, 2003: Updated Reminder - PHAs that administer Public Housing programs must ensure that all affected residents are performing their community service or self-sufficiency requirement by October 31, 2003 and report this information in the PIC Form 50058 module. The Office of PIH will begin checking PHA compliance with the community service and self-sufficiency requirement on a regular basis. See Notice PIH 2003-17 or contact your local field office for additional guidance on the reinstatement of the community service and self-sufficiency requirement. Note that PHA should no longer use "N/A" (which is coded as "5" on line 3q of the Form HUD-50058) when indicating a resident's community service or self-sufficiency status. The Form HUD-50058 Instruction Booklet contains information on when to use each of the valid codes (1, 2, 3 or 4) for line 3q to accurately report a resident's community service or self-sufficiency status.

October 24, 2003: This is a reminder to PHAs with Section 8 programs with 250 or more contracted voucher units and FYEs of 9/30 that your SEMAP certifications are due in PIC by no later than Saturday, November 29, 2003. Failure to complete the certification and to submit it in PIC by the due date will result in a SEMAP designation of "Troubled" for your agency. You should start the SEMAP certification process well in advance of the due date to allow time to resolve any problems within the schedule. Please contact your Field Office staff with programmatic questions and call the PICHelp line (1-800-366-6827) with PIC technical questions.

October 23, 2003: Public housing agencies (PHAs) that administer a Public Housing program must ensure that all affected residents are performing their community service or self-sufficiency requirement by October 31, 2003. See Notice PIH 2003-17 or call your local field office for additional guidance on the reinstatement of the community service and self-sufficiency requirement.

October 15, 2003: PIC will be taken offline for all users today (Wednesday) at 4:00 p.m. Eastern (1:00 p.m. Pacific) to permit unrestricted load testing of the prototype software for Upfront Income Verification, which supports a Presidential Initiative. We regret the short notice. PIC will be back online on Thursday morning.

October 7, 2003: PIC is experiencing significant slowdowns processing Form 50058 uploads. Processing continues but the problem has caused the processing time to lengthen to hours. We are investigating the problem and regret the inconvenience to users. No data or files are being lost and users may continue to upload data. We will report when the problem is corrected.

Beginning on October 20, 2003 HUD updated the software forums to consist of three venues:

October 2, 2003: We had previously announced PIH would turn scoring of SEMAP Indicator 12 (Annual HQS Inspection) for HAs with a Fiscal Year End of 6/30/2003. However, due to system problems, this has not been done. Indicator 12 will not be scored for 6/30/2003 and whether it will be scored for 9/30/2003 remains to be determined. We apologize for the confusion.

September 2, 2003: Implementation in PIC Production servers of Release 5.1 has been delayed three weeks due to a major security issue that arose in testing. PIH Management determined that it was in the best interests of PIC Users to delay the release until the security problem could be resolved. We apologize for the resulting inconvenience. The release will now be installed on PIC Production servers beginning on Friday, September 12 at 8 p.m. Eastern ( 5 p.m. Pacific). The system will be available to users after testing is completed, which should be later on Saturday.

August 25, 2003: Unforeseen technical difficulties have caused a delay in the release of PIC version 5.1. A new release date will be announced shortly. We regret any inconvenience caused by this delay and we thank you for your patience.

August 22, 2003: The PIC Change Control Board has approved an August 23rd (Saturday) date for implementation of Release 5.1 into PIC production. The installation will begin Friday evening after business hours. The system will be offline during the installation process. This date is subject to change for operational reasons. We will report any schedule changes via PIC Headlines and the PIC Home Page. We regret any inconvenience this scheduled outage causes and we thank you for your patience.

August 06, 2003: There will now be two releases to PIC production during August. The first release (an emergency release labeled "5.0.1") will upgrade the security and encryption functions in PIC in order to support the future Upfront Income Verification ("UIV") prototype. It is scheduled for installation in the next several days when testing is completed. The second August PIC release (now re-labeled "5.1") is the same quarterly release we have been calling "4.2". It is still scheduled for User Acceptance Testing August 11-15 and installation in PIC production the night of August 22. The only change is the new "5.1" label for the release.

August 01, 2003: The PIC Change Control Board has tentatively approved an August 23rd (Saturday) date for implementation of Release 4.2 into PIC production. The installation would begin the preceding Friday evening after business hours. The system will be offline during the installation process. This date is subject to change for operational reasons. We will report any schedule changes via PIC Headlines and the PIC Home Page.

July 23, 2003: PIC has experienced intermittent system outages during the past two weeks. On Saturday, July 12, the Internet service provider that supports HUD suffered a system outage which effectively blocked access to PIC and REAC for several hours. On Wednesday (July 16) and Friday (July 18) PIC went off line for about an hour each time due to database server hardware problems. These problems have been resolved and additional precautions have been taken. We apologize to our users for any inconvenience. HUD and contractor staff are closely monitoring the operations of all system components (hardware/software/infrastructure) to prevent or minimize any further disruption of services.